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this habit
N. David Mermin
After we came out of the church, we stood of the de Broglie–Bohm “pilot wave” in- that “the discontinuous change in the
talking for some time together of Bishop terpretation of quantum mechanics [quantum state] takes place . . . because
Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the from taking the wavefunction of N it is the discontinuous change in our
nonexistence of matter, and that every thing particles to be a real field in 3N- knowledge . . . that has its image in the
in the universe is merely ideal. I observed dimensional configuration space. They discontinuous change of the [state].”
that though we are satisfied his doctrine is give that high-dimensional configura- Admittedly, you can’t entirely elimi-
not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never tion space just as much physical reality nate the discomfort that gives rise to
shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson as the rest of us ascribe to ordinary “quantum nonlocality” and “the meas-
answered, striking his foot with mighty three-dimensional space. The reality of urement problem” by acknowledging
force against a large stone, till he rebounded the wavefunction is manifest in its abil- that quantum states are not real proper-
from it—“I refute it thus.” ity to control the motion of (real) parti- ties of the systems they describe. But the
—James Boswell, cles, just as a classical electromagnetic recognition that quantum states are cal-
The Life of Samuel Johnson field is able to control the motion of culational devices and not real proper-
classical charged particles. ties of a system forces one to formulate
There is nothing . . . more abstract than
Why does reifying the quantum the sources of that discomfort in more
reality.
state make life harder than it needs to nuanced, less sensational terms. Taking
—Giorgio Morandi,
be? Taking pilot waves seriously can that view of quantum states can dimin-
interview with Edouard Roditi
lead you to spend a lot of time calculat- ish the motivation for theoretical or ex-
A bad habit is something you do, ing, plotting, and proving theorems perimental searches for a “mechanism”
without being fully aware of it, that about the trajectory a (reified) point in underlying “spooky actions at a dis-
makes life harder than it needs to be. It configuration space is pushed along by tance” or the “collapse of the wavefunc-
is a bad habit of physicists to take their a (reified) wavefunction. The trajecto- tion”—searches that make life harder
most successful abstractions to be real ries make no predictions that can’t be than it needs to be.
properties of our world. Since the dis- arrived at using ordinary, trajectory-
tinction between real and abstract is no- free quantum mechanics. Their primary Quantum fields
toriously problematic, you might won- purpose is to fortify the view that quan- Of course, ordinary nonrelativistic
der what it means to wrongly confer tum states are real—a bad habit. quantum mechanics is just a phenome-
reality on something abstract. I shall il- Even for people who don’t believe in nology—a simplified version of quan-
lustrate our habit of inappropriately pilot waves pushing particles, reifying tum field theory, the most fundamental
reifying our successful abstractions the quantum state can make life harder theory we have about the constituents of
with several examples. than it needs to be. It can make them the real world. But what is the ontologi-
Perhaps the least controversial ex- worry about faster-than-light influ- cal status of those quantum fields that
amples are provided by quantum me- ences in the kinds of experiments first quantum field theory describes? Does
chanics. The quantum state may well be brought to attention by the famous Ein- reality consist of a four-dimensional
the most powerful abstraction we have stein-Podolsky-Rosen paper. In such spacetime at every point of which there
ever found. (“Found” is a useful word experiments a system instantaneously is a collection of operators on an infinite-
here, since you can take it to mean “dis- acquires a state as a result of actions dimensional Hilbert space?
covered” or “invented,” depending on confined to the vicinity of a second far- When I was a graduate student
where you stand along the real–abstract away system that no longer interacts learning quantum field theory, I had a
axis.) Are quantum states real? with the first. If the state of the first sys- friend who was enchanted by the reve-
In considering what that question tem is a real property of that system, lation that quantum fields were the real
might mean, recall that in the early days then something real has clearly been stuff that makes up the world. He rei-
Erwin Schrödinger thought that the transmitted to the first system from the fied quantum fields. But I hope you will
quantum state of a particle—in the form distant neighborhood of the second at agree that you are not a continuous field
of its wavefunction—was as real a field superluminal speed. If the state is of operators on an infinite-dimensional
as a classical electromagnetic field is merely a useful abstraction, then what, Hilbert space. Nor, for that matter, is the
real. He abandoned that view when if anything, has been transmitted and page you are reading or the chair you
he recognized that nonspreading where (or to whom) is far more obscure. are sitting in. Quantum fields are useful
wavepackets were a peculiarity of the Reifying the quantum state also in- mathematical tools. They enable us to
harmonic oscillator, and that the wave- duces people to write books and organ- calculate things.
function of N particles is a field only in ize conferences about “the quantum What kinds of things? Trajectories in
a 3N-dimensional space. measurement problem” rather than ac- spark chambers, nuclear level dia-
But that does not prevent advocates knowledging, with Werner Heisenberg, grams, atomic spectra, tunneling rates